Xmas/New Year Competition – No. 9

It has been many years since trains ran into this station. Yet in its heyday, it was the terminus of a very busy narrow gauge railway which should be known – by reputation, if not from personal acquaintance – to most BTWT readers. I paid two visits to the line when it was still working, once in the 1960s and once in the 1970s, and on the occasion of my last visit managed to talk myself aboard the footplate for a brief ride while our engine, a Px48, was running round its train at this very location.

Armed with a fistful of clues, I trust that today’s location will prove a walkover. The same cannot be said for our last location which stumped everybody. This is quite surprising given that the line closed as recently as 2008, and would have been seen by anyone looking out of the window and travelling by train from Krakow to Przeworsk and destinations further East.

The line was the 600 mm Igloobud brickworks railway in Debica. It carried clay from an opencast mine in Wolica – a suburb of Debica – to the brickworks adjacent to the mainline. It was opened in 1968 and served for 40 years. Most of the track, except that buried in the street, was dismantled in May 2009. Had it not been for the Ministry of Finance regulation that owners of industrial railways have to pay local authority taxes on their railways, the line might be running still.

A Google Maps ‘slippy map’ (can be scrolled and zoomed) of the No. 8 location on the Debica brickworks railway.